Description of problem: a while (few minutes) after logging in X seems to gradually lock up the system. first the mouse stops moving. a few minutes later the system becomes entirely unresponsive and never (left it for several hours) recovers. if i ctrl-alt-bksp when the mouse stops moving then the system survives. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): something-something-195.2 i think. pretty sure ...194 made gdm die and ...195 fixed that but caused this. How reproducible: always. but it doesn't go wrong if i leave the system at the gdm screen. also it's possible it doesn't go wrong if i use a default gnome desktop. good luck! let me know what more info i should provide and what i can try changing. for example, should i try vesa, fglrx and the F7 ati drivers for comparison? is it worth messing with bios settings and disabling composite, aiglx and dri?
are you using desktop effects? running compiz? if yes, please disable them. if no, try disabling DRI and see what happens..
i'd already switched desktop effects off. i've just done a yum update and reboot and now we're back to gdm crashing/restarting X. the update doesn't appear to contain any changes to this component or gdm. the most significant updates i can see are libX11, libgnome, udev and glibc. so, anyway, i'd like to try disabling DRI. hmmmmm. is there a Right way of doing that? i'm not using an xorg.conf file and the old one i used to use (created by s-c-d) doesn't have a 'Modules' section in it. do i just make one with an empty Modules section? in case it's relevant: i've got two monitors connected to the card, both vga, one in a dvi-vga converter. it's defaulting to clone mode - i couldn't get dual-head working.
ah. it's okay - i just found the default xorg.conf in the Xorg.0.log file. i'll copy it and comment out DRI. brb.
right, done that. gdm still appears to be killing X. xinit works okay. from that xterm, twm works but metacity dies immediately with "Illegal instruction" (well, i think that's what it says - i've got the system stuck in French for the time being!)
BTW, thanks for the quick response yesterday - sorry i didn't spot it until today. i'll stick around this time if you want to try a few things quickly. :-)
okay, gdm problem is something else - just changed to vesa driver and it's still restarting X when gdm runs. i think i'll do a clean f8t3 dvd install and see how it is after that.
Cool, please, let us know, how Xorg went after reinstall.
it's all looking pretty good. tried lots of 3D stuff and it's not gone wrong yet. :-)
aha! broke it again, fixed it. enabling laptop-mode from http://samwel.tk/laptop_mode/packages/fedora caused the "gdm screen restarts X" problem - even if using the vesa driver. however, it's something specific to this platform as i have laptop-mode enabled elsewhere without this problem. i'll keep looking into it and raise it elsewhere if i can pin it down a bit. thanks again.